2 entries from August 2018

A provocative article appeared in the somewhat obscure magazine Illustrated World suggesting a gigantic apparatus for signalling to possible observing beings on Mars. John B. Flowers, author of "Signaling to the Planets with a Cloth Reflector", reported on a remarkable structure suggesting a possible way of communicating with intelligent life on the other planets--principally, it seems, Mars. The briefest background here shows that the most popularizing idea of life on Mars came about as a mistranslation/interpretation of astronomer's Giovanni Schiaparelli's observing term "canali" to be "canals/channels", meaning an intelligent life form existed on the planet capable of constructing large technological forms. This idea was given full flight by Percy Lowell in his 1895 book Mars, followed just two years later by H.G. Welles' War of the Worlds.

The uncredited idea in the Flowers article called for a a series of connected mechanisms holding white sheets over a 200 x 10 mile (!) section of Federal desert lands, the movements of the sheets conducted by 600 large motors, making use of the segmented sheets to send messages via Morse code. The $21 million plan would repeat "Earth" and "Mars" over and over again until a response was heard. It was the hope that the Martians receiving the message would figure out the the dots/dashes related to Earth/Mars, finding that "Earth" was equal to their word for Earth ("Blapo", for example) and "Mars" for (again, for example) their "Dule". And so on. The article is only two pages long and for what its worth it spends a fair amount of space on the description of the apparatus, and a little on what it was that would be transmitted. There isn't a word spent on what the consequences might be if the Martians returned the favor.

That said, the idea of life on Mars had mostly lost its pinkish pulse by 1920, though people still were still tinkering with ideas of how to communicate with alien forms of life over vast distances. Camille Flammarion, for example, advocated turning desert land into a massive Las Vegas, heating up the desert with millions of light bulbs and then using them to flash signals who-knows-where. Harvard's William Pickering advocated an enormous mirror to reflect sunlight back into space somewhere, and R.W. Wood floated a similar idea to what is described by flowers, except the opposite, using black cloth over white sand. Over the next twenty years, into the 1940's, the interest seems less in communication than with the visiting the place.

Notes

For a contemporary description of these ideas see "Hello Mars, this is Earth! Will the Martians Answer Us?", in Popular Science Monthly, 1919, July-December, pp 74-5, full text here: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.d0002769792;view=1up;seq=345

Also: here's a good article (with the same title as the above but written in 2012) by Matt Novak in Smithsonian dot com exactly on this Pop Sci Monthly 1919 article. Well done!

A short article (with a smaller photo illustration) on a very big topic appeared in Illustrated World in June 1921. The photo showed a remarkable plane constructed by aeronautical engineer Giovanni Caproni (1886-1957)--three planes, really. Three triplanes were attached to a floating Pullman-like fuselage, making this the largest/heaviest aircraft ever built at that time. It was 32' high, 66' long, and 130' wide, and was made to seat 100 and make a transatlantic voyage. This was the "Noviplano" (the Caproni Ca. 6c, and translated in the article as "Nine-plannen"), and presented itself in an impressive if not complicated manner--it was a prototype, though, and was crashed and finished on its second flight.